The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capapable of trainign to be a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There is a lump of labour fallacy going on with people who think we need to keep importing people to fill jobs in every sector though.
Our population after being stable for most of the post-war era has since the turn of the century grown by over ten million people. We've been consistently "short of workers" since the introduction of the minimum wage (which also acted as a maximum wage), Brown massively expanding in-work benefits, and the expansion of the European Union.
Ten million extra people later and we're still "short of workers". After our population has expanded by hundreds of thousands net every single year, after our population has grown by ten million people, why are we still "short of plumbers, and farm help, and wait staff, and drivers, and baristas, and abattoir workers, and ..."?
The answer of course is because the idea we're short of workers is a lump of labour fallacy. There is no labour shortage - you bring in more people and the labour market will respond because all of those new people will need their own plumber, their own restaurants to go to, their own goods that need drivers, their own coffee etc too
Labour shortages can not be filled by immigration. That's a lump of labour fallacy.
One thought worth exploring is that 'Work expands (or contracts) to provide for the people available.' Just as there is exactly enough news every day to fill exactly a 30 minute bulletin. Essentially the planet earth is, and had to be, a giant job creation scheme.
IMHO what has happened, partly through FOM, partly through over educating some quite dim people, is the creation of some millions of non-jobs, many of which should in a sane world vanish, being replaced by sensible ones, like designing and making machinery for picking strawberries and blackcurrants.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
Even people who loathe her will recognise she was a transformative PM, even if they think its for the wrong reasons. Even people who loathe her will recognise that she was courageous in the Yes Minister sense.
You can fail to be courageous and muddle along and keep getting elected, but never actually do anything, and just let Sir Humphrey run the show. That's what Tony Blair did - and how fondly is he remembered now?
Blair is also highly talked about. It sounds like you just contradicted yourself.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
I actually think Maggie is becoming more of a footnote as time goes on. Boris clearly thought so in his conference speech - he more or less lumped Thatcherism in as just another piece of historical failure for his greatness to rectify.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
'Anything worth doing is difficult' is patent bollocks. Writing a will is worth doing; it's not difficult. Breathing is worth doing; it's not difficult.
I certainly agree that 'some things worth doing are difficult'. But I sure as hell know there are plenty of very difficult things were never worth doing and shouldn't have been attempted in the first place.
There is no reliable correlation between 'worth doing' and 'difficult'.
The point is: you're saying Brexit is worth doing and difficult; I'm saying it was never worth doing and difficult. We're agreed it's difficult. I'd say it wouldn't be worth doing, even if it were easy (which it could have been tbh, if we'd chosen EEA or single market.
We were of course told it would be 'the easiest thing in the world'.
Learning to write is bloody difficult. Lots of people never master it!
I'm sure many people would be pushed to write an actual letter now without a screen.
I was in a bookshop the other day and, staring at the shelves, found myself longing for a Ctrl F function.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
I actually think Maggie is becoming more of a footnote as time goes on. Boris clearly thought so in his conference speech - he more or less lumped Thatcherism in as just another piece of historical failure for his greatness to rectify.
I say one thing for Thatcher right off the bat, she believed in something that wasn't herself. That puts her head and shoulders above Boris even from 6ft down.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capapable of trainign to be a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There is a lump of labour fallacy going on with people who think we need to keep importing people to fill jobs in every sector though.
Our population after being stable for most of the post-war era has since the turn of the century grown by over ten million people. We've been consistently "short of workers" since the introduction of the minimum wage (which also acted as a maximum wage), Brown massively expanding in-work benefits, and the expansion of the European Union.
Ten million extra people later and we're still "short of workers". After our population has expanded by hundreds of thousands net every single year, after our population has grown by ten million people, why are we still "short of plumbers, and farm help, and wait staff, and drivers, and baristas, and abattoir workers, and ..."?
The answer of course is because the idea we're short of workers is a lump of labour fallacy. There is no labour shortage - you bring in more people and the labour market will respond because all of those new people will need their own plumber, their own restaurants to go to, their own goods that need drivers, their own coffee etc too
Labour shortages can not be filled by immigration. That's a lump of labour fallacy.
One thought worth exploring is that 'Work expands (or contracts) to provide for the people available.' Just as there is exactly enough news every day to fill exactly a 30 minute bulletin.
IMHO what has happened, partly through FOM, partly through over educating some quite dim people, is the creation of some millions of non-jobs, many of which should in a sane world vanish, being replaced by sensible ones, like designing and making machinery for picking strawberries and blackcurrants.
That anthropologist David Gaebner wrote a book called "Bullshit Jobs" brought a wry smile to my lips.
But of course he may be right. In which case you think a period of labour shortages would begin to eliminate such jobs, as well as causing supply-line issues, empty-shelves and accelerating inflation.
Maybe this is all part of Johnson's master plan... but somehow I think it just one huge f*ck-up.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The UK is prospering hadn't you heard.
Yes it is. The "crisis" is that we have "too many jobs" supposedly.
Even if that wasn't a lump of labour fallacy, that's like the late, great @SeanT coming on here and saying he has a crisis of too many hot, nubile, young women throwing themselves at him.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The UK is prospering hadn't you heard.
Yes it is. The "crisis" is that we have "too many jobs" supposedly.
Even if that wasn't a lump of labour fallacy, that's like the late, great @SeanT coming on here and saying he has a crisis of too many hot, nubile, young women throwing themselves at him.
So the gas prices, pigs, petrol, inflation expectations...
Oh and did you miss my comment earlier. Was your Embolden yesterday a clue as to how you can manage to be on here all the time?
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
'Anything worth doing is difficult' is patent bollocks. Writing a will is worth doing; it's not difficult. Breathing is worth doing; it's not difficult.
I certainly agree that 'some things worth doing are difficult'. But I sure as hell know there are plenty of very difficult things were never worth doing and shouldn't have been attempted in the first place.
There is no reliable correlation between 'worth doing' and 'difficult'.
The point is: you're saying Brexit is worth doing and difficult; I'm saying it was never worth doing and difficult. We're agreed it's difficult. I'd say it wouldn't be worth doing, even if it were easy (which it could have been tbh, if we'd chosen EEA or single market.
We were of course told it would be 'the easiest thing in the world'.
Learning to write is bloody difficult. Lots of people never master it!
Sorry if my post was a little bit to complicated for you to understand.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capable of training as a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There really needs to be a phrase, similar to "Oriental lassitude" which can be used to be derogatory about British workers in a similar, saloon-bar-racist way. Would save a lot of typing.
You're accusing me of being derogatory about British workers??
Well none of them actually work, do they? I understand that all the jobs are actually done by foreigners.
Time for a proper government to put a maximum wage in place, as in 1515.
Wtaf are you on about?
The solution to the various problems with workers is simple to fix
1) A fixed maximum wage of 4d a day in Summer, 5d in Winter. 2) Anyone without a job gets branded with V for Vagabond on the face.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
I didn't know Leicestershire was still in the middle ages.
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
Yes, but the key thing is that University offers the opportunity (not certainty) of more interesting work, and work with prospect of advancement. I don't blame people for looking for it.
So you think you need to go to university to get 'interesting work' and 'prospects of advancement' ?
I'll assume there's no casual snobbery but have you considered what might apply for yourself might not apply for some other people ?
Now I don't criticize anyone for looking into university but what I don't like is that the £10k debt per year is something which will not go away and that's a big risk any teenager is accepting when their experience of the wider world is limited.
If going to university turns out to be the wrong decision they still have the debt and years have been used (with lost earning potential) on something which might be of no use.
If getting a job turns out to be the wrong decision then they've still had experience in the workplace, earned some money and perhaps learned that a certain career is not for them but with no debt and still have the opportunity to go to university a year or two afterwards.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The UK is prospering hadn't you heard.
Yes it is. The "crisis" is that we have "too many jobs" supposedly.
Even if that wasn't a lump of labour fallacy, that's like the late, great @SeanT coming on here and saying he has a crisis of too many hot, nubile, young women throwing themselves at him.
So the gas prices, pigs, petrol, inflation expectations...
Oh and did you miss my comment earlier. Was your Embolden yesterday a clue as to how you can manage to be on here all the time?
I will wet myself laughing if I eventually find out that I've been arguing on here all these years with a bunch of Russian trollbots, rather than with otherwise intelligent people with unfathomably rightish views. 😂
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
I didn't know Leicestershire was still in the middle ages.
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
Yes, but the key thing is that University offers the opportunity (not certainty) of more interesting work, and work with prospect of advancement. I don't blame people for looking for it.
So you think you need to go to university to get 'interesting work' and 'prospects of advancement' ?
I'll assume there's no casual snobbery but have you considered what might apply for yourself might not apply for some other people ?
Now I don't criticize anyone for looking into university but what I don't like is that the £10k debt per year is something which will not go away and that's a big risk any teenager is accepting when their experience of the wider world is limited.
If going to university turns out to be the wrong decision they still have the debt and years have been used (with lost earning potential) on something which might be of no use.
If getting a job turns out to be the wrong decision then they've still had experience in the workplace, earned some money and perhaps learned that a certain career is not for them but with no debt and still have the opportunity to go to university a year or two afterwards.
Minor point: student debt does magically go away after 55 IIRC.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I will have to go back (actually I won't) but were you one of those pushing the there will be upheaval for twenty years line in your Brexit supporting arguments pre-referendum.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
I doubt many rural communities would be overly bothered to see the back of intensively reared pig farming and the imported workforce which goes with it.
As long as the grain fields and meadows with sheep baaing / cattle mooing remain people will be happy with what the British countryside looks like.
Precisely as I explained. Remove UC and you won't have much upland farming. It's aĺl agriculture round here. None of it intensive, barely any subsidised, barely any profitable. And not a foreign worker to be seen. Nor anyone above minimum wage.
Now you could subsidise it as part of rural tourism / environment management - pretty baa lambs and dry stone walls etc.
With a charge on all the second home owners / holiday lets in the area to fund it.
Aren't some of the existing subsidies for this exactly - without sheep grazing, chunks of it would change in character etc?
Yes. You'd end up with wild flowers and pollinating insects. Fewer sheep, better uplands.
Actually I agree with this. If the uplands are to be de-populated, the return of forest wilderness to its natural state would be good. Won't hold my breath though. It will be prettified or used for shooting or some such.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
No and he would be an idiot to do so given every current poll shows the Tories losing seats compared to 2019.
Half the current polls even have the Tories losing their majority and a hung parliament. He will wait until 2023/4.
As May and Trudeau showed in 2017 and this September unnecessary elections called early rarely get the big majorities aimed for, both scraped back into power rather than romping home
But HY, the prospects going forward look bleak, horrendous infact.
A December 2021 election gives Johnson a circa 40/50 seat majority until May 2026 by which time he could happily jump ship to the US after dinner circuit.
The added bonus of a defeated Starmer would leave the Labour Party in turmoil.
It's a win, win, win for Johnson. Not so much for the rest of us.
He can happily jump ship to that circuit at any time, so I am not sure that makes the case for why he would go early.
Shape up!
He goes super early to give himself another guaranteed two years. Johnson has already indicated he plans to ride the gravy train after a couple of years into his next victory, so 2026 would fit perfectly. That of course is not the reason for going early. The reason for going early is to avoid a future loss should the economy continue to look grim all the way to 2024.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
Exactly. It’ll cause some ripples for sure, but to think it’s going to be an eternal crisis like some seem to suggest is just absurd.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The UK is prospering hadn't you heard.
Yes it is. The "crisis" is that we have "too many jobs" supposedly.
Even if that wasn't a lump of labour fallacy, that's like the late, great @SeanT coming on here and saying he has a crisis of too many hot, nubile, young women throwing themselves at him.
So the gas prices, pigs, petrol, inflation expectations...
Oh and did you miss my comment earlier. Was your Embolden yesterday a clue as to how you can manage to be on here all the time?
I will wet myself laughing if I eventually find out that I've been arguing on here all these years with a bunch of Russian trollbots, rather than otherewise intelligent people with unfathomably rightish views. 😂
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
That entire thread is hilariously insane. People from across the EU - and a couple of Americans - who honestly believe Britain is close to collapse. And famine.
Are they all reading the New York Times, and nothing else?!
It’s genuinely hard to fathom. One element must be Strasbourg Syndrome. Brexit is evil therefore it can only cause evil things to the evildoers responsible. It is a religious reflex at work
Yes, it sort of goes back to what I was talking about earlier today. The EU projects this image of perfection which causes people idealise it. We see it on here all the time. They have an almost religious zeal about the EU because in the back of their minds they know the EU is imperfect, the image it projects is false and they are overcompensating because they realise the moment they admit it isn't perfect those flaws and those minor imperfections add up, the doubt grows and suddenly the institution they place above all others a mess of undemocratic contradictions and the UK was right to leave.
Lots of people really believe the EU is the only game in town, their world is being shattered right now as the UK prospers completely outside of its structures. This is their worst nightmare come true.
A French minister has accused the British, today, of being ‘obsessed with France’, even as several other French ministers publicly announce plans to blockade Britain, ‘cut off all ties with Britain’, deprive Britain of electricity, ‘punish the British for Brexit’, ‘stop British exports’ - and this is just one day
Imagine if several British Cabinet ministers were making daily threats against France. That *would* be obsessive
You can watch French TV for days and the UK never features. Too much Telegraph can be misleading.
Mwanwhile I give you a rare Englishman who is actually admired.....Dr Rashford
But it’s the same on British TV. It looks much more to America (too much, for me) - but also increasingly to Asia, and China
Meanwhile a comparison between the home pages, right now, of Le Monde and the Guardian is quite instructive.
Both have about 50 stories. Just two of the stories in Le Monde are definitely about Britain: one is about Covid in the UK, the other about the Saudi-Newcastle takeover. Meanwhile in the Guardian there’s just one story ‘about France’ - but it is expressly about deteriorating Franco-Brit relations. So, about the same?
The UK-French-EU ‘obsession’ is mutual, but it is only happening in social media and only amongst politicians, Eurocrats, and geeks like us. It is a real thing, however. This is the pinned tweet of Finland’s ex prime minister, also mentioned below
‘Reading news about petrol shortages and other supply problems in the UK. Really sad to see what #Brexit is doing to a country that used to be great. Brexit is the biggest mistake a modern nation state has inflicted on itself in recent history. Hope to see an end to this mess.’
That’s his pinned tweet. That’s the opinion he has which he thinks is most important right now. Wtf. He’s Finnish. Lol
Hopefully in a few years when Brexit is accepted we can all go back to courteously ignoring each other, like normal neighbours
Finland's ex PM is on the money. There is a change in mood and it's not for the better. The Cote d'Azur doesn't feel part English anymore which is rather sad.
There IS a sadness to Brexit, which I share. The EU has noble origins - the quest for peaceful harmony in Europe. Freedom of Movement was the best thing about it, and I regret the loss. I hope one day a compromise can be found that satisfies all sides and restores it, at least in part
The great tragedy is that Brexit didn’t have to happen. If only a UK government had offered a referendum much earlier, maybe after Maastricht or Lisbon, we’d have said No to further integration, and that compromise would have been found. And we’d probably be a happy but semi-detached country, still associated with the EU and enjoying some of those benefits. And Nice would still feel a little bit English
But no, the British europhiles, in their arrogance, kept forcing more and more integration on us, without seeking our explicit democratic consent, stoking greater and greater anger over decades. Until eventually the final total rupture became inevitable
It is a melancholy story. And the authors are Major, Blair, Heseltine, Brown, Clarke, Cameron, et al. It is the europhiles who created Brexit. Indeed, with their push for a ‘2nd referendum’, they made sure we got the hardest Brexit of all, right at the end. The cherry on their ridiculous cake. It is magnificent irony, fit for the ages
Exactly right. The roots of Brexit are decades old in the policy disaster of believing that gradual integration without the people being explicitly asked would work always. Once FOM and the Euro were in place there was no chance that could work for ever with the UK population. Even if 2016 had been lost the actual issues would never have gone away.
And it was extraordinary that every major UK politician and party fell for this mixture of self delusion, denial, and attempt to delude the public for decades when referenda as done in other countries would have sorted it without all this difficulty.
Only marginal figures of left and right seemed to comprehend any of this, even though it is essentially a centrist issue.
Part of the problem was europhile narcissism and snobbery, now physically visible in its end-life form: the red-faced gargoyle that is the classic Remoaner
They always looked down on the eurosceptics as thick racist cranks. Recall Cameron’s lofty dismissal of UKIP. Recall the many times we were told ‘the EU is not an issue, polls show it’. So they ignored the dangers as trivial. All the while eurosceptic opinion crept into the mainstream, undermining the foundations of consent in our polity like a rot in the basement.
Indeed this snobbery probably helped push Leave over the referendum finishing line. Remain could easily have won if they’d been just a touch less arrogant, wanky, condescending and complacent
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The UK is prospering hadn't you heard.
Yes it is. The "crisis" is that we have "too many jobs" supposedly.
Even if that wasn't a lump of labour fallacy, that's like the late, great @SeanT coming on here and saying he has a crisis of too many hot, nubile, young women throwing themselves at him.
So the gas prices, pigs, petrol, inflation expectations...
Oh and did you miss my comment earlier. Was your Embolden yesterday a clue as to how you can manage to be on here all the time?
I manage to be on here as I work sometimes very long hours on my Laptop and I come on here for a distraction when I'm in-between elements to do. Then I press Ctrl+F and search for my name to see if there's been any replies, and if I'm interested I reply to those replies. It doesn't take that long to do that.
Everyone else is pretty similar I guess, its pretty much the same names on here each day.
As for Embolden, that name worked for the pun so it was a lucky shout that's all - glad it 'broke the timeline' and won you some money though. But I have been gambling more recently and getting a decent income from it lately, trying to be careful but have found a system that is working for me very nicely indeed. I won't write it in public though, its not politics-related, so PM if interested.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capable of training as a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There really needs to be a phrase, similar to "Oriental lassitude" which can be used to be derogatory about British workers in a similar, saloon-bar-racist way. Would save a lot of typing.
You're accusing me of being derogatory about British workers??
Well none of them actually work, do they? I understand that all the jobs are actually done by foreigners.
Time for a proper government to put a maximum wage in place, as in 1515.
Wtaf are you on about?
The solution to the various problems with workers is simple to fix
1) A fixed maximum wage of 4d a day in Summer, 5d in Winter. 2) Anyone without a job gets branded with V for Vagabond on the face.
Well, it is Friday evening I guess - the wine must be flowing!
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
Even people who loathe her will recognise she was a transformative PM, even if they think its for the wrong reasons. Even people who loathe her will recognise that she was courageous in the Yes Minister sense.
You can fail to be courageous and muddle along and keep getting elected, but never actually do anything, and just let Sir Humphrey run the show. That's what Tony Blair did - and how fondly is he remembered now?
That very harsh. Tony Blair courageously took the UK into the Iraq war.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
I actually think Maggie is becoming more of a footnote as time goes on. Boris clearly thought so in his conference speech - he more or less lumped Thatcherism in as just another piece of historical failure for his greatness to rectify.
Britain has only had two Prime Ministers. Churchill and Bozo. Everyone else was just keeping the seat warm.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
That entire thread is hilariously insane. People from across the EU - and a couple of Americans - who honestly believe Britain is close to collapse. And famine.
Are they all reading the New York Times, and nothing else?!
It’s genuinely hard to fathom. One element must be Strasbourg Syndrome. Brexit is evil therefore it can only cause evil things to the evildoers responsible. It is a religious reflex at work
Yes, it sort of goes back to what I was talking about earlier today. The EU projects this image of perfection which causes people idealise it. We see it on here all the time. They have an almost religious zeal about the EU because in the back of their minds they know the EU is imperfect, the image it projects is false and they are overcompensating because they realise the moment they admit it isn't perfect those flaws and those minor imperfections add up, the doubt grows and suddenly the institution they place above all others a mess of undemocratic contradictions and the UK was right to leave.
Lots of people really believe the EU is the only game in town, their world is being shattered right now as the UK prospers completely outside of its structures. This is their worst nightmare come true.
A French minister has accused the British, today, of being ‘obsessed with France’, even as several other French ministers publicly announce plans to blockade Britain, ‘cut off all ties with Britain’, deprive Britain of electricity, ‘punish the British for Brexit’, ‘stop British exports’ - and this is just one day
Imagine if several British Cabinet ministers were making daily threats against France. That *would* be obsessive
You can watch French TV for days and the UK never features. Too much Telegraph can be misleading.
Mwanwhile I give you a rare Englishman who is actually admired.....Dr Rashford
But it’s the same on British TV. It looks much more to America (too much, for me) - but also increasingly to Asia, and China
Meanwhile a comparison between the home pages, right now, of Le Monde and the Guardian is quite instructive.
Both have about 50 stories. Just two of the stories in Le Monde are definitely about Britain: one is about Covid in the UK, the other about the Saudi-Newcastle takeover. Meanwhile in the Guardian there’s just one story ‘about France’ - but it is expressly about deteriorating Franco-Brit relations. So, about the same?
The UK-French-EU ‘obsession’ is mutual, but it is only happening in social media and only amongst politicians, Eurocrats, and geeks like us. It is a real thing, however. This is the pinned tweet of Finland’s ex prime minister, also mentioned below
‘Reading news about petrol shortages and other supply problems in the UK. Really sad to see what #Brexit is doing to a country that used to be great. Brexit is the biggest mistake a modern nation state has inflicted on itself in recent history. Hope to see an end to this mess.’
That’s his pinned tweet. That’s the opinion he has which he thinks is most important right now. Wtf. He’s Finnish. Lol
Hopefully in a few years when Brexit is accepted we can all go back to courteously ignoring each other, like normal neighbours
Finland's ex PM is on the money. There is a change in mood and it's not for the better. The Cote d'Azur doesn't feel part English anymore which is rather sad.
There IS a sadness to Brexit, which I share. The EU has noble origins - the quest for peaceful harmony in Europe. Freedom of Movement was the best thing about it, and I regret the loss. I hope one day a compromise can be found that satisfies all sides and restores it, at least in part
The great tragedy is that Brexit didn’t have to happen. If only a UK government had offered a referendum much earlier, maybe after Maastricht or Lisbon, we’d have said No to further integration, and that compromise would have been found. And we’d probably be a happy but semi-detached country, still associated with the EU and enjoying some of those benefits. And Nice would still feel a little bit English
But no, the British europhiles, in their arrogance, kept forcing more and more integration on us, without seeking our explicit democratic consent, stoking greater and greater anger over decades. Until eventually the final total rupture became inevitable
It is a melancholy story. And the authors are Major, Blair, Heseltine, Brown, Clarke, Cameron, et al. It is the europhiles who created Brexit. Indeed, with their push for a ‘2nd referendum’, they made sure we got the hardest Brexit of all, right at the end. The cherry on their ridiculous cake. It is magnificent irony, fit for the ages
Exactly right. The roots of Brexit are decades old in the policy disaster of believing that gradual integration without the people being explicitly asked would work always. Once FOM and the Euro were in place there was no chance that could work for ever with the UK population. Even if 2016 had been lost the actual issues would never have gone away.
And it was extraordinary that every major UK politician and party fell for this mixture of self delusion, denial, and attempt to delude the public for decades when referenda as done in other countries would have sorted it without all this difficulty.
Only marginal figures of left and right seemed to comprehend any of this, even though it is essentially a centrist issue.
Part of the problem was europhile narcissism and snobbery, now physically visible in its end-life form: the red-faced gargoyle that is the classic Remoaner
They always looked down on the eurosceptics as thick racist cranks. Recall Cameron’s lofty dismissal of UKIP. Recall the many times we were told ‘the EU is not an issue, polls show it’. So they ignored the dangers as trivial. All the while eurosceptic opinion crept into the mainstream, undermining the foundations of consent in our polity like a rot in the basement.
Indeed this snobbery probably helped push Leave over the referendum finishing line. Remain could easily have won if they’d been just a touch less arrogant, wanky, condescending and complacent
Lessons from Leon about narcissism? Good night all.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
And those headlines apply across Europe and beyond
This energy crisis and supply crisis is worldwide and yes, UK has labour shortages now we do not use cheap EU labour depressing UK wages.
Expect to see labour crossover very soon but it does not alter the fundamentals unless labour wants to turn the taps on again of cheap foreign labour
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
Twenty years?
A bit f****** late for me as the sun begins to shine on those unicorn roamed uplands on the eve of my eightieth birthday.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
Particularly amusing is the aside about Francis Bacon and his chilly poultry, which also fits with your cold turkey analogy. On a freezing day in 1626, Francis Bacon ran outside and stuffed a chicken with snow to see if this action would preserve it. His exposure to cold on this day possibly caused him to develop the pneumonia from which he died.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
I didn't know Leicestershire was still in the middle ages.
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
Yes, but the key thing is that University offers the opportunity (not certainty) of more interesting work, and work with prospect of advancement. I don't blame people for looking for it.
So you think you need to go to university to get 'interesting work' and 'prospects of advancement' ?
I'll assume there's no casual snobbery but have you considered what might apply for yourself might not apply for some other people ?
Now I don't criticize anyone for looking into university but what I don't like is that the £10k debt per year is something which will not go away and that's a big risk any teenager is accepting when their experience of the wider world is limited.
If going to university turns out to be the wrong decision they still have the debt and years have been used (with lost earning potential) on something which might be of no use.
If getting a job turns out to be the wrong decision then they've still had experience in the workplace, earned some money and perhaps learned that a certain career is not for them but with no debt and still have the opportunity to go to university a year or two afterwards.
No, not snobbery.
I am just accepting that youngsters have agency and are able to make their own decisions about what they want to do with the opportunities that come their way.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The UK is prospering hadn't you heard.
Yes it is. The "crisis" is that we have "too many jobs" supposedly.
Even if that wasn't a lump of labour fallacy, that's like the late, great @SeanT coming on here and saying he has a crisis of too many hot, nubile, young women throwing themselves at him.
So the gas prices, pigs, petrol, inflation expectations...
Oh and did you miss my comment earlier. Was your Embolden yesterday a clue as to how you can manage to be on here all the time?
I will wet myself laughing if I eventually find out that I've been arguing on here all these years with a bunch of Russian trollbots, rather than otherewise intelligent people with unfathomably rightish views. 😂
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
I was hoping for a mitigated disaster. So far, so wrong.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
All things are relative though. There was a time back there when we thought VAT on pasties spelled end of days.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
Particularly amusing is the aside about Francis Bacon and his chilly poultry, which also fits with your cold turkey analogy. On a freezing day in 1626, Francis Bacon ran outside and stuffed a chicken with snow to see if this action would preserve it. His exposure to cold on this day possibly caused him to develop the pneumonia from which he died.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
I didn't know Leicestershire was still in the middle ages.
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
Yes, but the key thing is that University offers the opportunity (not certainty) of more interesting work, and work with prospect of advancement. I don't blame people for looking for it.
So you think you need to go to university to get 'interesting work' and 'prospects of advancement' ?
I'll assume there's no casual snobbery but have you considered what might apply for yourself might not apply for some other people ?
Now I don't criticize anyone for looking into university but what I don't like is that the £10k debt per year is something which will not go away and that's a big risk any teenager is accepting when their experience of the wider world is limited.
If going to university turns out to be the wrong decision they still have the debt and years have been used (with lost earning potential) on something which might be of no use.
If getting a job turns out to be the wrong decision then they've still had experience in the workplace, earned some money and perhaps learned that a certain career is not for them but with no debt and still have the opportunity to go to university a year or two afterwards.
Minor point: student debt does magically go away after 55 IIRC.
Would you trust what governments might do during the next thirty years
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
That entire thread is hilariously insane. People from across the EU - and a couple of Americans - who honestly believe Britain is close to collapse. And famine.
Are they all reading the New York Times, and nothing else?!
It’s genuinely hard to fathom. One element must be Strasbourg Syndrome. Brexit is evil therefore it can only cause evil things to the evildoers responsible. It is a religious reflex at work
Yes, it sort of goes back to what I was talking about earlier today. The EU projects this image of perfection which causes people idealise it. We see it on here all the time. They have an almost religious zeal about the EU because in the back of their minds they know the EU is imperfect, the image it projects is false and they are overcompensating because they realise the moment they admit it isn't perfect those flaws and those minor imperfections add up, the doubt grows and suddenly the institution they place above all others a mess of undemocratic contradictions and the UK was right to leave.
Lots of people really believe the EU is the only game in town, their world is being shattered right now as the UK prospers completely outside of its structures. This is their worst nightmare come true.
A French minister has accused the British, today, of being ‘obsessed with France’, even as several other French ministers publicly announce plans to blockade Britain, ‘cut off all ties with Britain’, deprive Britain of electricity, ‘punish the British for Brexit’, ‘stop British exports’ - and this is just one day
Imagine if several British Cabinet ministers were making daily threats against France. That *would* be obsessive
You can watch French TV for days and the UK never features. Too much Telegraph can be misleading.
Mwanwhile I give you a rare Englishman who is actually admired.....Dr Rashford
But it’s the same on British TV. It looks much more to America (too much, for me) - but also increasingly to Asia, and China
Meanwhile a comparison between the home pages, right now, of Le Monde and the Guardian is quite instructive.
Both have about 50 stories. Just two of the stories in Le Monde are definitely about Britain: one is about Covid in the UK, the other about the Saudi-Newcastle takeover. Meanwhile in the Guardian there’s just one story ‘about France’ - but it is expressly about deteriorating Franco-Brit relations. So, about the same?
The UK-French-EU ‘obsession’ is mutual, but it is only happening in social media and only amongst politicians, Eurocrats, and geeks like us. It is a real thing, however. This is the pinned tweet of Finland’s ex prime minister, also mentioned below
‘Reading news about petrol shortages and other supply problems in the UK. Really sad to see what #Brexit is doing to a country that used to be great. Brexit is the biggest mistake a modern nation state has inflicted on itself in recent history. Hope to see an end to this mess.’
That’s his pinned tweet. That’s the opinion he has which he thinks is most important right now. Wtf. He’s Finnish. Lol
Hopefully in a few years when Brexit is accepted we can all go back to courteously ignoring each other, like normal neighbours
Finland's ex PM is on the money. There is a change in mood and it's not for the better. The Cote d'Azur doesn't feel part English anymore which is rather sad.
There IS a sadness to Brexit, which I share. The EU has noble origins - the quest for peaceful harmony in Europe. Freedom of Movement was the best thing about it, and I regret the loss. I hope one day a compromise can be found that satisfies all sides and restores it, at least in part
The great tragedy is that Brexit didn’t have to happen. If only a UK government had offered a referendum much earlier, maybe after Maastricht or Lisbon, we’d have said No to further integration, and that compromise would have been found. And we’d probably be a happy but semi-detached country, still associated with the EU and enjoying some of those benefits. And Nice would still feel a little bit English
But no, the British europhiles, in their arrogance, kept forcing more and more integration on us, without seeking our explicit democratic consent, stoking greater and greater anger over decades. Until eventually the final total rupture became inevitable
It is a melancholy story. And the authors are Major, Blair, Heseltine, Brown, Clarke, Cameron, et al. It is the europhiles who created Brexit. Indeed, with their push for a ‘2nd referendum’, they made sure we got the hardest Brexit of all, right at the end. The cherry on their ridiculous cake. It is magnificent irony, fit for the ages
Exactly right. The roots of Brexit are decades old in the policy disaster of believing that gradual integration without the people being explicitly asked would work always. Once FOM and the Euro were in place there was no chance that could work for ever with the UK population. Even if 2016 had been lost the actual issues would never have gone away.
And it was extraordinary that every major UK politician and party fell for this mixture of self delusion, denial, and attempt to delude the public for decades when referenda as done in other countries would have sorted it without all this difficulty.
Only marginal figures of left and right seemed to comprehend any of this, even though it is essentially a centrist issue.
Part of the problem was europhile narcissism and snobbery, now physically visible in its end-life form: the red-faced gargoyle that is the classic Remoaner
They always looked down on the eurosceptics as thick racist cranks. Recall Cameron’s lofty dismissal of UKIP. Recall the many times we were told ‘the EU is not an issue, polls show it’. So they ignored the dangers as trivial. All the while eurosceptic opinion crept into the mainstream, undermining the foundations of consent in our polity like a rot in the basement.
Indeed this snobbery probably helped push Leave over the referendum finishing line. Remain could easily have won if they’d been just a touch less arrogant, wanky, condescending and complacent
The one thing that unites my remoaner aquaintences from my mere remainer ones is that they seem to genuinely think they are better than other people. I always thought they said snobbish things in jest, as I do. But it turns out it was real.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
I didn't know Leicestershire was still in the middle ages.
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
Yes, but the key thing is that University offers the opportunity (not certainty) of more interesting work, and work with prospect of advancement. I don't blame people for looking for it.
So you think you need to go to university to get 'interesting work' and 'prospects of advancement' ?
I'll assume there's no casual snobbery but have you considered what might apply for yourself might not apply for some other people ?
Now I don't criticize anyone for looking into university but what I don't like is that the £10k debt per year is something which will not go away and that's a big risk any teenager is accepting when their experience of the wider world is limited.
If going to university turns out to be the wrong decision they still have the debt and years have been used (with lost earning potential) on something which might be of no use.
If getting a job turns out to be the wrong decision then they've still had experience in the workplace, earned some money and perhaps learned that a certain career is not for them but with no debt and still have the opportunity to go to university a year or two afterwards.
No, not snobbery.
I am just accepting that youngsters have agency and are able to make their own decisions about what they want to do with the opportunities that come there way.
That's all well and good if they come from the right background but those working class kids should just know their station, get a job doing grunt work, and suck it up!
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
I didn't know Leicestershire was still in the middle ages.
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
Yes, but the key thing is that University offers the opportunity (not certainty) of more interesting work, and work with prospect of advancement. I don't blame people for looking for it.
Quite apart from that it offers the opportunity to move away from home, in reasonable security, experience a completely different part of the country, and meet hundreds of new folk your own age from all backgrounds, without your parents or relatives or neighbours knowing all your business. It really isn't about a purely financial cost/benefit analysis.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
I didn't know Leicestershire was still in the middle ages.
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
Yes, but the key thing is that University offers the opportunity (not certainty) of more interesting work, and work with prospect of advancement. I don't blame people for looking for it.
So you think you need to go to university to get 'interesting work' and 'prospects of advancement' ?
I'll assume there's no casual snobbery but have you considered what might apply for yourself might not apply for some other people ?
Now I don't criticize anyone for looking into university but what I don't like is that the £10k debt per year is something which will not go away and that's a big risk any teenager is accepting when their experience of the wider world is limited.
If going to university turns out to be the wrong decision they still have the debt and years have been used (with lost earning potential) on something which might be of no use.
If getting a job turns out to be the wrong decision then they've still had experience in the workplace, earned some money and perhaps learned that a certain career is not for them but with no debt and still have the opportunity to go to university a year or two afterwards.
Minor point: student debt does magically go away after 55 IIRC.
Would you trust what governments might do during the next thirty years
Fair point - I wouldn't trust what this one will be doing in 30 days.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
I'll bet you £1,000 that it is.
Interesting bet!
Brexit is bloody big but it’s not monumental. Covid is monumental, so Brexit is already number 2 in the ‘list of significant things to happen to Britain this century’
If Scotland had voted yes that would also have been bigger than Brexit
We’ve got 79 years to go until 2100. If the 21st century is as eventful as the 20th then Brexit will definitely be relegated much further down the list. Let’s hope the 21st century isn’t that ‘interesting’ but the omens so far are that it will be, and might very possibly be much MORE turbulent, from global war with China to proper AI to aliens saying Hi to robots taking over to climate apocalypse to migration wars and on and on
My guess: Brexit will probably scrape in to the top 10, but right at the bottom. Many bigger things will hit us
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
I actually think Maggie is becoming more of a footnote as time goes on. Boris clearly thought so in his conference speech - he more or less lumped Thatcherism in as just another piece of historical failure for his greatness to rectify.
Britain has only had two Prime Ministers. Churchill and Bozo. Everyone else was just keeping the seat warm.
Churchill was surely just Johnson's John the Baptist.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
That entire thread is hilariously insane. People from across the EU - and a couple of Americans - who honestly believe Britain is close to collapse. And famine.
Are they all reading the New York Times, and nothing else?!
It’s genuinely hard to fathom. One element must be Strasbourg Syndrome. Brexit is evil therefore it can only cause evil things to the evildoers responsible. It is a religious reflex at work
Yes, it sort of goes back to what I was talking about earlier today. The EU projects this image of perfection which causes people idealise it. We see it on here all the time. They have an almost religious zeal about the EU because in the back of their minds they know the EU is imperfect, the image it projects is false and they are overcompensating because they realise the moment they admit it isn't perfect those flaws and those minor imperfections add up, the doubt grows and suddenly the institution they place above all others a mess of undemocratic contradictions and the UK was right to leave.
Lots of people really believe the EU is the only game in town, their world is being shattered right now as the UK prospers completely outside of its structures. This is their worst nightmare come true.
A French minister has accused the British, today, of being ‘obsessed with France’, even as several other French ministers publicly announce plans to blockade Britain, ‘cut off all ties with Britain’, deprive Britain of electricity, ‘punish the British for Brexit’, ‘stop British exports’ - and this is just one day
Imagine if several British Cabinet ministers were making daily threats against France. That *would* be obsessive
You can watch French TV for days and the UK never features. Too much Telegraph can be misleading.
Mwanwhile I give you a rare Englishman who is actually admired.....Dr Rashford
But it’s the same on British TV. It looks much more to America (too much, for me) - but also increasingly to Asia, and China
Meanwhile a comparison between the home pages, right now, of Le Monde and the Guardian is quite instructive.
Both have about 50 stories. Just two of the stories in Le Monde are definitely about Britain: one is about Covid in the UK, the other about the Saudi-Newcastle takeover. Meanwhile in the Guardian there’s just one story ‘about France’ - but it is expressly about deteriorating Franco-Brit relations. So, about the same?
The UK-French-EU ‘obsession’ is mutual, but it is only happening in social media and only amongst politicians, Eurocrats, and geeks like us. It is a real thing, however. This is the pinned tweet of Finland’s ex prime minister, also mentioned below
‘Reading news about petrol shortages and other supply problems in the UK. Really sad to see what #Brexit is doing to a country that used to be great. Brexit is the biggest mistake a modern nation state has inflicted on itself in recent history. Hope to see an end to this mess.’
That’s his pinned tweet. That’s the opinion he has which he thinks is most important right now. Wtf. He’s Finnish. Lol
Hopefully in a few years when Brexit is accepted we can all go back to courteously ignoring each other, like normal neighbours
Finland's ex PM is on the money. There is a change in mood and it's not for the better. The Cote d'Azur doesn't feel part English anymore which is rather sad.
There IS a sadness to Brexit, which I share. The EU has noble origins - the quest for peaceful harmony in Europe. Freedom of Movement was the best thing about it, and I regret the loss. I hope one day a compromise can be found that satisfies all sides and restores it, at least in part
The great tragedy is that Brexit didn’t have to happen. If only a UK government had offered a referendum much earlier, maybe after Maastricht or Lisbon, we’d have said No to further integration, and that compromise would have been found. And we’d probably be a happy but semi-detached country, still associated with the EU and enjoying some of those benefits. And Nice would still feel a little bit English
But no, the British europhiles, in their arrogance, kept forcing more and more integration on us, without seeking our explicit democratic consent, stoking greater and greater anger over decades. Until eventually the final total rupture became inevitable
It is a melancholy story. And the authors are Major, Blair, Heseltine, Brown, Clarke, Cameron, et al. It is the europhiles who created Brexit. Indeed, with their push for a ‘2nd referendum’, they made sure we got the hardest Brexit of all, right at the end. The cherry on their ridiculous cake. It is magnificent irony, fit for the ages
Exactly right. The roots of Brexit are decades old in the policy disaster of believing that gradual integration without the people being explicitly asked would work always. Once FOM and the Euro were in place there was no chance that could work for ever with the UK population. Even if 2016 had been lost the actual issues would never have gone away.
And it was extraordinary that every major UK politician and party fell for this mixture of self delusion, denial, and attempt to delude the public for decades when referenda as done in other countries would have sorted it without all this difficulty.
Only marginal figures of left and right seemed to comprehend any of this, even though it is essentially a centrist issue.
Part of the problem was europhile narcissism and snobbery, now physically visible in its end-life form: the red-faced gargoyle that is the classic Remoaner
They always looked down on the eurosceptics as thick racist cranks. Recall Cameron’s lofty dismissal of UKIP. Recall the many times we were told ‘the EU is not an issue, polls show it’. So they ignored the dangers as trivial. All the while eurosceptic opinion crept into the mainstream, undermining the foundations of consent in our polity like a rot in the basement.
Indeed this snobbery probably helped push Leave over the referendum finishing line. Remain could easily have won if they’d been just a touch less arrogant, wanky, condescending and complacent
The one thing that unites my remoaner aquaintences from my mere remainer ones is that they seem to genuinely think they are better than other people. I always thought they said snobbish things in jest, as I do. But it turns out it was real.
I think the other issue is a refusal to accept when you were wrong or to see things as anything other than black and white.
I was a Remainer until 2016, though I thought that the EU was flawed I felt like the pros outweighed the cons. But then people here posted some interesting pros, the cons kept mounting up so eventually I switched sides and backed Leave but always expected there to be disruption. Either way though I could always see arguments on both sides, it wasn't all or nothing.
So when people now post about disruption then my attitude is "well what else did you expect?" Of course there's going to be some disruption. Not having any is like wanting flowers to grow but for there to never be any rain.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
I actually think Maggie is becoming more of a footnote as time goes on. Boris clearly thought so in his conference speech - he more or less lumped Thatcherism in as just another piece of historical failure for his greatness to rectify.
Britain has only had two Prime Ministers. Churchill and Bozo. Everyone else was just keeping the seat warm.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
Why not start a war then? Plenty of disruption. I and many others like a quiet life. Sorry if that isn't economically productive.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
I actually think Maggie is becoming more of a footnote as time goes on. Boris clearly thought so in his conference speech - he more or less lumped Thatcherism in as just another piece of historical failure for his greatness to rectify.
Britain has only had two Prime Ministers. Churchill and Bozo. Everyone else was just keeping the seat warm.
I'm surprised Mr Johnson didn't go on to say how he would be so mucb better than Messrs Disraeli, Gladstone, Palmerston, Pitt and Walpole.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
I actually think Maggie is becoming more of a footnote as time goes on. Boris clearly thought so in his conference speech - he more or less lumped Thatcherism in as just another piece of historical failure for his greatness to rectify.
Britain has only had two Prime Ministers. Churchill and Bozo. Everyone else was just keeping the seat warm.
I'm surprised Mr Johnson didn't go on to say how he would be so mucb better than Messrs Disraeli, Gladstone, Palmerston, Pitt and Walpole.
Being reasonable, how many people would really know more than their names? I read a book on PMs only a few months ago and would still be hard pressed to recall major accomplishments even of those venerated names.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
I'll bet you £1,000 that it is.
Interesting bet!
Brexit is bloody big but it’s not monumental. Covid is monumental, so Brexit is already number 2 in the ‘list of significant things to happen to Britain this century’
If Scotland had voted yes that would also have been bigger than Brexit
We’ve got 79 years to go until 2100. If the 21st century is as eventful as the 20th then Brexit will definitely be relegated much further down the list. Let’s hope the 21st century isn’t that ‘interesting’ but the omens so far are that it will be, and might very possibly be much MORE turbulent, from global war with China to proper AI to aliens saying Hi to robots taking over to climate apocalypse to migration wars and on and on
My guess: Brexit will probably scrape in to the top 10, but right at the bottom. Many bigger things will hit us
Interesting thought - what are the the biggest stories/events/transformations of the 21st century so far and how would you order them?
I would say: 1: Covid 2: 9/11 and war on terror 3: The rise of online shopping/death of the high street 4: Brexit 5: Financial crisis
4 & 5 might ultimately swap positions.
#3 is probably long term the biggest thing of the last 21 years, but generally gets overlooked.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
That entire thread is hilariously insane. People from across the EU - and a couple of Americans - who honestly believe Britain is close to collapse. And famine.
Are they all reading the New York Times, and nothing else?!
It’s genuinely hard to fathom. One element must be Strasbourg Syndrome. Brexit is evil therefore it can only cause evil things to the evildoers responsible. It is a religious reflex at work
Yes, it sort of goes back to what I was talking about earlier today. The EU projects this image of perfection which causes people idealise it. We see it on here all the time. They have an almost religious zeal about the EU because in the back of their minds they know the EU is imperfect, the image it projects is false and they are overcompensating because they realise the moment they admit it isn't perfect those flaws and those minor imperfections add up, the doubt grows and suddenly the institution they place above all others a mess of undemocratic contradictions and the UK was right to leave.
Lots of people really believe the EU is the only game in town, their world is being shattered right now as the UK prospers completely outside of its structures. This is their worst nightmare come true.
A French minister has accused the British, today, of being ‘obsessed with France’, even as several other French ministers publicly announce plans to blockade Britain, ‘cut off all ties with Britain’, deprive Britain of electricity, ‘punish the British for Brexit’, ‘stop British exports’ - and this is just one day
Imagine if several British Cabinet ministers were making daily threats against France. That *would* be obsessive
You can watch French TV for days and the UK never features. Too much Telegraph can be misleading.
Mwanwhile I give you a rare Englishman who is actually admired.....Dr Rashford
But it’s the same on British TV. It looks much more to America (too much, for me) - but also increasingly to Asia, and China
Meanwhile a comparison between the home pages, right now, of Le Monde and the Guardian is quite instructive.
Both have about 50 stories. Just two of the stories in Le Monde are definitely about Britain: one is about Covid in the UK, the other about the Saudi-Newcastle takeover. Meanwhile in the Guardian there’s just one story ‘about France’ - but it is expressly about deteriorating Franco-Brit relations. So, about the same?
The UK-French-EU ‘obsession’ is mutual, but it is only happening in social media and only amongst politicians, Eurocrats, and geeks like us. It is a real thing, however. This is the pinned tweet of Finland’s ex prime minister, also mentioned below
‘Reading news about petrol shortages and other supply problems in the UK. Really sad to see what #Brexit is doing to a country that used to be great. Brexit is the biggest mistake a modern nation state has inflicted on itself in recent history. Hope to see an end to this mess.’
That’s his pinned tweet. That’s the opinion he has which he thinks is most important right now. Wtf. He’s Finnish. Lol
Hopefully in a few years when Brexit is accepted we can all go back to courteously ignoring each other, like normal neighbours
Finland's ex PM is on the money. There is a change in mood and it's not for the better. The Cote d'Azur doesn't feel part English anymore which is rather sad.
There IS a sadness to Brexit, which I share. The EU has noble origins - the quest for peaceful harmony in Europe. Freedom of Movement was the best thing about it, and I regret the loss. I hope one day a compromise can be found that satisfies all sides and restores it, at least in part
The great tragedy is that Brexit didn’t have to happen. If only a UK government had offered a referendum much earlier, maybe after Maastricht or Lisbon, we’d have said No to further integration, and that compromise would have been found. And we’d probably be a happy but semi-detached country, still associated with the EU and enjoying some of those benefits. And Nice would still feel a little bit English
But no, the British europhiles, in their arrogance, kept forcing more and more integration on us, without seeking our explicit democratic consent, stoking greater and greater anger over decades. Until eventually the final total rupture became inevitable
It is a melancholy story. And the authors are Major, Blair, Heseltine, Brown, Clarke, Cameron, et al. It is the europhiles who created Brexit. Indeed, with their push for a ‘2nd referendum’, they made sure we got the hardest Brexit of all, right at the end. The cherry on their ridiculous cake. It is magnificent irony, fit for the ages
Exactly right. The roots of Brexit are decades old in the policy disaster of believing that gradual integration without the people being explicitly asked would work always. Once FOM and the Euro were in place there was no chance that could work for ever with the UK population. Even if 2016 had been lost the actual issues would never have gone away.
And it was extraordinary that every major UK politician and party fell for this mixture of self delusion, denial, and attempt to delude the public for decades when referenda as done in other countries would have sorted it without all this difficulty.
Only marginal figures of left and right seemed to comprehend any of this, even though it is essentially a centrist issue.
Part of the problem was europhile narcissism and snobbery, now physically visible in its end-life form: the red-faced gargoyle that is the classic Remoaner
They always looked down on the eurosceptics as thick racist cranks. Recall Cameron’s lofty dismissal of UKIP. Recall the many times we were told ‘the EU is not an issue, polls show it’. So they ignored the dangers as trivial. All the while eurosceptic opinion crept into the mainstream, undermining the foundations of consent in our polity like a rot in the basement.
Indeed this snobbery probably helped push Leave over the referendum finishing line. Remain could easily have won if they’d been just a touch less arrogant, wanky, condescending and complacent
The one thing that unites my remoaner aquaintences from my mere remainer ones is that they seem to genuinely think they are better than other people. I always thought they said snobbish things in jest, as I do. But it turns out it was real.
Such nonsense. *I* am better than everyone else. Obviously.
On another note, saw this in another place....
The wind blew thinly on the ridge of the bank Where the river once flowed strong and wide. Time flows ever onward while the rivertop sank And in the wind the walls slowly dried.
And the eventual silence lay like the tomb Of pharaohs yet to be born And the Cambrian bloom died in the dry planet's womb With none left behind there to mourn.
'Till a rover did spy in the red dusty sky The remains of the beauty that bled And the story it told of a river that flowed Made me sad to think it was dead
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
I actually think Maggie is becoming more of a footnote as time goes on. Boris clearly thought so in his conference speech - he more or less lumped Thatcherism in as just another piece of historical failure for his greatness to rectify.
Britain has only had two Prime Ministers. Churchill and Bozo. Everyone else was just keeping the seat warm.
I'm surprised Mr Johnson didn't go on to say how he would be so mucb better than Messrs Disraeli, Gladstone, Palmerston, Pitt and Walpole.
Being reasonable, how many people would really know more than their names? I read a book on PMs only a few months ago and would still be hard pressed to recall major accomplishments even of those venerated names.
Gladstone - the Crofters Areas, Irish home rule (sort of). Disraeli - blocking the above. Palmerston - forts (I do like them). Pitt - winning the wars. Walpole - being Prime Prime Minister.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capapable of trainign to be a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There is a lump of labour fallacy going on with people who think we need to keep importing people to fill jobs in every sector though.
Our population after being stable for most of the post-war era has since the turn of the century grown by over ten million people. We've been consistently "short of workers" since the introduction of the minimum wage (which also acted as a maximum wage), Brown massively expanding in-work benefits, and the expansion of the European Union.
Ten million extra people later and we're still "short of workers". After our population has expanded by hundreds of thousands net every single year, after our population has grown by ten million people, why are we still "short of plumbers, and farm help, and wait staff, and drivers, and baristas, and abattoir workers, and ..."?
The answer of course is because the idea we're short of workers is a lump of labour fallacy. There is no labour shortage - you bring in more people and the labour market will respond because all of those new people will need their own plumber, their own restaurants to go to, their own goods that need drivers, their own coffee etc too
Labour shortages can not be filled by immigration. That's a lump of labour fallacy.
One thought worth exploring is that 'Work expands (or contracts) to provide for the people available.' Just as there is exactly enough news every day to fill exactly a 30 minute bulletin.
IMHO what has happened, partly through FOM, partly through over educating some quite dim people, is the creation of some millions of non-jobs, many of which should in a sane world vanish, being replaced by sensible ones, like designing and making machinery for picking strawberries and blackcurrants.
That anthropologist David Gaebner wrote a book called "Bullshit Jobs" brought a wry smile to my lips.
But of course he may be right. In which case you think a period of labour shortages would begin to eliminate such jobs, as well as causing supply-line issues, empty-shelves and accelerating inflation.
Maybe this is all part of Johnson's master plan... but somehow I think it just one huge f*ck-up.
But what if Brexit gets rid of the useful jobs, and leaves only the Bullshit ones?
After all, those with no serious work to do have much more time for the office politics of self preservation.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The UK is prospering hadn't you heard.
Yes it is. The "crisis" is that we have "too many jobs" supposedly.
Even if that wasn't a lump of labour fallacy, that's like the late, great @SeanT coming on here and saying he has a crisis of too many hot, nubile, young women throwing themselves at him.
So the gas prices, pigs, petrol, inflation expectations...
Oh and did you miss my comment earlier. Was your Embolden yesterday a clue as to how you can manage to be on here all the time?
I will wet myself laughing if I eventually find out that I've been arguing on here all these years with a bunch of Russian trollbots, rather than with otherwise intelligent people with unfathomably rightish views. 😂
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
"Project Fear" lest you forget was an immediate recession and half a million unemployed.
Nobody would have dared use "full employment, job vacancies and pay rises" as Project Fear. Well apart from Stuart Rose, but he was telling the truth not engaging in Fear.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
"As they came past us - panting, cajoling, shouting - it was hard to believe what we were seeing.
Here, in broad daylight, were dozens of migrants, manhandling a large inflatable boat down a northern French beach, to get to the seafront in order to cross the Channel.
Forget the normal rules about subterfuge - this was as brazen and overt as you could possibly get. And what's more, eight French police officers were watching from about a hundred metres away, and making no effort to get involved."
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
I didn't know Leicestershire was still in the middle ages.
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
Yes, but the key thing is that University offers the opportunity (not certainty) of more interesting work, and work with prospect of advancement. I don't blame people for looking for it.
So you think you need to go to university to get 'interesting work' and 'prospects of advancement' ?
I'll assume there's no casual snobbery but have you considered what might apply for yourself might not apply for some other people ?
Now I don't criticize anyone for looking into university but what I don't like is that the £10k debt per year is something which will not go away and that's a big risk any teenager is accepting when their experience of the wider world is limited.
If going to university turns out to be the wrong decision they still have the debt and years have been used (with lost earning potential) on something which might be of no use.
If getting a job turns out to be the wrong decision then they've still had experience in the workplace, earned some money and perhaps learned that a certain career is not for them but with no debt and still have the opportunity to go to university a year or two afterwards.
No, not snobbery.
I am just accepting that youngsters have agency and are able to make their own decisions about what they want to do with the opportunities that come their way.
Decision making improves with knowledge and experience.
And many decisions made can turn out to be mistakes.
The LibDems supporting an increase in tuition fees for example.
I only hope that there aren't too many teenagers who have made a fuck-up decision of that magnitude in their career choice this year.
"As they came past us - panting, cajoling, shouting - it was hard to believe what we were seeing.
Here, in broad daylight, were dozens of migrants, manhandling a large inflatable boat down a northern French beach, to get to the seafront in order to cross the Channel.
Forget the normal rules about subterfuge - this was as brazen and overt as you could possibly get. And what's more, eight French police officers were watching from about a hundred metres away, and making no effort to get involved."
Those poor souls, desperate to escape from the eternal misery that is France.
"As they came past us - panting, cajoling, shouting - it was hard to believe what we were seeing.
Here, in broad daylight, were dozens of migrants, manhandling a large inflatable boat down a northern French beach, to get to the seafront in order to cross the Channel.
Forget the normal rules about subterfuge - this was as brazen and overt as you could possibly get. And what's more, eight French police officers were watching from about a hundred metres away, and making no effort to get involved."
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
Interesting thought - what are the the biggest stories/events/transformations of the 21st century so far and how would you order them?
I would say: 1: Covid 2: 9/11 and war on terror 3: The rise of online shopping/death of the high street 4: Brexit 5: Financial crisis
4 & 5 might ultimately swap positions.
#3 is probably long term the biggest thing of the last 21 years, but generally gets overlooked.
The biggest changes are often those that are gradual rather than an individual event that is easily dated.
Computers existed and were common in the home before access to the Internet became widely available, but the world we live in now is very different from the world of the 70s or 80s. Your phone in your pocket is a much more personal and powerful computer than what we used to call personal computers. The Internet and ubiquity of smartphones is a much bigger change than Brexit.
"As they came past us - panting, cajoling, shouting - it was hard to believe what we were seeing.
Here, in broad daylight, were dozens of migrants, manhandling a large inflatable boat down a northern French beach, to get to the seafront in order to cross the Channel.
Forget the normal rules about subterfuge - this was as brazen and overt as you could possibly get. And what's more, eight French police officers were watching from about a hundred metres away, and making no effort to get involved."
Those poor souls, desperate to escape from the eternal misery that is France.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
"Project Fear" lest you forget was an immediate recession and half a million unemployed.
Nobody would have dared use "full employment, job vacancies and pay rises" as Project Fear. Well apart from Stuart Rose, but he was telling the truth not engaging in Fear.
It turned out to be right in almost all respects, except one. I was one of those who expected an immediate hit to business after the referendum, because of the collapse of confidence. That didn't happen (except as regards the exchange rate), and I'm happy to admit I was wrong on that. In retrospect, the long period between the referendum and the end of last year, which is when Brexit actually happened for practical purposes, meant that the effect was much slower that I'd thought it would be.
On the other hand, in many respects it's far, far worse than I was expecting. I never thought relations with our EU ex-friends would get as bad as they now are, or that the government would turn so vehemently anti-business, or that we'd leave such excellent schemes as REACH and CE marking, or not agree an SPS deal with the EU, or that any PM would be so brain-dead as to put a border down the Irish Sea. As a result of those unexpectedly bad decisions, there's a lot more pain to come - much of it hasn't kicked in yet.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
"As they came past us - panting, cajoling, shouting - it was hard to believe what we were seeing.
Here, in broad daylight, were dozens of migrants, manhandling a large inflatable boat down a northern French beach, to get to the seafront in order to cross the Channel.
Forget the normal rules about subterfuge - this was as brazen and overt as you could possibly get. And what's more, eight French police officers were watching from about a hundred metres away, and making no effort to get involved."
The weird part is the police's actions doing nothing (which is not surprising), then suddenly seemingly getting dressed up.
At some point, the police officers did move. While standing in the sea, filming the migrant boat and watching men argue about the engine, we noticed that the officers were now standing in a line, about 100 metres away from us.
For some reason, they were now wearing protective riot helmets and some were brandishing shields. Yet they didn't approach the boat, and nobody approached the police
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
But don't worry, 10 years later we'll largely be over the worst!
We're already 4 years later, and still with Brexit incomplete (no incoming customs controls etc.)
We're just past 9 months after childbirth.
2016 we decided we wanted to have the baby. 2017 we started trying, but found it difficult to conceive at first. 2017-19 was spent arguing about whether we should still go ahead with having a child or not, should we give up on the whole concept, go natural, use IVF. Drugs or a hard home birth? Nobody could agree and it led to many fights. January 2020 (Brexit day) finally got pregnant! But now comes a "transition" period of pregnancy before the child is born. New Year's Eve the transition ends and the child finally comes screaming into the world.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
But don't worry, 10 years later we'll largely be over the worst!
We're already 4 years later, and still with Brexit incomplete (no incoming customs controls etc.)
We Brexited on January 1, 2020, as Remoaners constantly pointed out in the years prior - ‘it hasn’t happened yet, just you wait’
When we introduce customs controls, we will be taking a gradual approach, reminding lorries with insufficient paperwork to get it right next time, and letting them through, at least at first. We won’t be letting lorries of fish rot because the paperwork is in the wrong colour ink, like the french.
"As they came past us - panting, cajoling, shouting - it was hard to believe what we were seeing.
Here, in broad daylight, were dozens of migrants, manhandling a large inflatable boat down a northern French beach, to get to the seafront in order to cross the Channel.
Forget the normal rules about subterfuge - this was as brazen and overt as you could possibly get. And what's more, eight French police officers were watching from about a hundred metres away, and making no effort to get involved."
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
I'll bet you £1,000 that it is.
Interesting bet!
Brexit is bloody big but it’s not monumental. Covid is monumental, so Brexit is already number 2 in the ‘list of significant things to happen to Britain this century’
If Scotland had voted yes that would also have been bigger than Brexit
We’ve got 79 years to go until 2100. If the 21st century is as eventful as the 20th then Brexit will definitely be relegated much further down the list. Let’s hope the 21st century isn’t that ‘interesting’ but the omens so far are that it will be, and might very possibly be much MORE turbulent, from global war with China to proper AI to aliens saying Hi to robots taking over to climate apocalypse to migration wars and on and on
My guess: Brexit will probably scrape in to the top 10, but right at the bottom. Many bigger things will hit us
Interesting thought - what are the the biggest stories/events/transformations of the 21st century so far and how would you order them?
I would say: 1: Covid 2: 9/11 and war on terror 3: The rise of online shopping/death of the high street 4: Brexit 5: Financial crisis
4 & 5 might ultimately swap positions.
#3 is probably long term the biggest thing of the last 21 years, but generally gets overlooked.
Pah! Never mind the 21st century, what, in order of impact, are the biggest events/tranformations that affected Britain during the 2nd millennium?
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking:
1. The Norman Conquest (yep, even after nearly a 1000 years) 2. The Industrial Revolution 3. The two World Wars (got to treat them as one) 4. The English Civil War 5. The Reformation
What - no room for the Empire? Printing? the Enlightenment? Who knows?
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
I'll bet you £1,000 that it is.
Interesting bet!
Brexit is bloody big but it’s not monumental. Covid is monumental, so Brexit is already number 2 in the ‘list of significant things to happen to Britain this century’
If Scotland had voted yes that would also have been bigger than Brexit
We’ve got 79 years to go until 2100. If the 21st century is as eventful as the 20th then Brexit will definitely be relegated much further down the list. Let’s hope the 21st century isn’t that ‘interesting’ but the omens so far are that it will be, and might very possibly be much MORE turbulent, from global war with China to proper AI to aliens saying Hi to robots taking over to climate apocalypse to migration wars and on and on
My guess: Brexit will probably scrape in to the top 10, but right at the bottom. Many bigger things will hit us
Interesting thought - what are the the biggest stories/events/transformations of the 21st century so far and how would you order them?
I would say: 1: Covid 2: 9/11 and war on terror 3: The rise of online shopping/death of the high street 4: Brexit 5: Financial crisis
4 & 5 might ultimately swap positions.
#3 is probably long term the biggest thing of the last 21 years, but generally gets overlooked.
#3 could be described as 'internet' and applies to many things beyond retail for example twenty years ago various people from around the world couldn't have been having a discussion as if they were all in the same place.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
I actually think Maggie is becoming more of a footnote as time goes on. Boris clearly thought so in his conference speech - he more or less lumped Thatcherism in as just another piece of historical failure for his greatness to rectify.
Britain has only had two Prime Ministers. Churchill and Bozo. Everyone else was just keeping the seat warm.
I'm surprised Mr Johnson didn't go on to say how he would be so mucb better than Messrs Disraeli, Gladstone, Palmerston, Pitt and Walpole.
Being reasonable, how many people would really know more than their names? I read a book on PMs only a few months ago and would still be hard pressed to recall major accomplishments even of those venerated names.
Gladstone - the Crofters Areas, Irish home rule (sort of). Disraeli - blocking the above. Palmerston - forts (I do like them). Pitt - winning the wars. Walpole - being Prime Prime Minister.
Earl Grey never gets in there. Great Reform Act, world famous tea blend, porking the Duchess of Devonshire, abolition of slavery, a mahoosive monument and 16 kids. No wonder he only had the strength for 4 years at the top.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
But don't worry, 10 years later we'll largely be over the worst!
We're already 4 years later, and still with Brexit incomplete (no incoming customs controls etc.)
We do seem to have taken a unique slant. Having Brexited, we have subjected a lot of our exports to customs controls, but have not done so for EU imports, which can enter freely.
No doubt @Philip_Thompson will see this as a victory for British consumers as we have free access to European goods, while Europeans are deprived of our goods, therefore advantage to British consumers.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
I'll bet you £1,000 that it is.
Interesting bet!
Brexit is bloody big but it’s not monumental. Covid is monumental, so Brexit is already number 2 in the ‘list of significant things to happen to Britain this century’
If Scotland had voted yes that would also have been bigger than Brexit
We’ve got 79 years to go until 2100. If the 21st century is as eventful as the 20th then Brexit will definitely be relegated much further down the list. Let’s hope the 21st century isn’t that ‘interesting’ but the omens so far are that it will be, and might very possibly be much MORE turbulent, from global war with China to proper AI to aliens saying Hi to robots taking over to climate apocalypse to migration wars and on and on
My guess: Brexit will probably scrape in to the top 10, but right at the bottom. Many bigger things will hit us
Interesting thought - what are the the biggest stories/events/transformations of the 21st century so far and how would you order them?
I would say: 1: Covid 2: 9/11 and war on terror 3: The rise of online shopping/death of the high street 4: Brexit 5: Financial crisis
4 & 5 might ultimately swap positions.
#3 is probably long term the biggest thing of the last 21 years, but generally gets overlooked.
#3 could be described as 'internet' and applies to many things beyond retail for example twenty years ago various people from around the world couldn't have been having a discussion as if they were all in the same place.
I thought about that, but the internet had already taken off in the 90s. But the internet of the 90s was more message boards and stuff like that, than the internet of today.
Smartphones absolutely should have made the list though too. Utterly ubiquitous now and meaning people are always-online wherever they are anywhere on the planet now.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
I'll bet you £1,000 that it is.
Interesting bet!
Brexit is bloody big but it’s not monumental. Covid is monumental, so Brexit is already number 2 in the ‘list of significant things to happen to Britain this century’
If Scotland had voted yes that would also have been bigger than Brexit
We’ve got 79 years to go until 2100. If the 21st century is as eventful as the 20th then Brexit will definitely be relegated much further down the list. Let’s hope the 21st century isn’t that ‘interesting’ but the omens so far are that it will be, and might very possibly be much MORE turbulent, from global war with China to proper AI to aliens saying Hi to robots taking over to climate apocalypse to migration wars and on and on
My guess: Brexit will probably scrape in to the top 10, but right at the bottom. Many bigger things will hit us
Interesting thought - what are the the biggest stories/events/transformations of the 21st century so far and how would you order them?
I would say: 1: Covid 2: 9/11 and war on terror 3: The rise of online shopping/death of the high street 4: Brexit 5: Financial crisis
4 & 5 might ultimately swap positions.
#3 is probably long term the biggest thing of the last 21 years, but generally gets overlooked.
Pretty good list. I’d put the ‘advent of social media’ in there as well, if that can be counted as a ‘21st century event’ - MySpace, the first really big one, kicked off in 2003. It has transformed so much, often for the worst.
A pretty hefty list for just 2 decades, possibly matching the first decades of the 20th century, which was horrifically busy. It also shows that, ultimately, Brexit will be seen as relatively minor. It won’t make the global top 10, and might not even make the UK top ten
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
But don't worry, 10 years later we'll largely be over the worst!
We're already 4 years later, and still with Brexit incomplete (no incoming customs controls etc.)
We do seem to have taken a unique slant. Having Brexited, we have subjected a lot of our exports to customs controls, but have not done so for EU imports, which can enter freely.
No doubt @Philip_Thompson will see this as a victory for British consumers as we have free access to European goods, while Europeans are deprived of our goods, therefore advantage to British consumers.
If customs controls are cutting off your own nose to spite your face then absolutely I'm happy to not have them, even if others choose to do so, you called that right.
Similarly with tariffs. I'd be happy to unilaterally abolish all tariffs even if other parties don't.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
I'll bet you £1,000 that it is.
Interesting bet!
Brexit is bloody big but it’s not monumental. Covid is monumental, so Brexit is already number 2 in the ‘list of significant things to happen to Britain this century’
If Scotland had voted yes that would also have been bigger than Brexit
We’ve got 79 years to go until 2100. If the 21st century is as eventful as the 20th then Brexit will definitely be relegated much further down the list. Let’s hope the 21st century isn’t that ‘interesting’ but the omens so far are that it will be, and might very possibly be much MORE turbulent, from global war with China to proper AI to aliens saying Hi to robots taking over to climate apocalypse to migration wars and on and on
My guess: Brexit will probably scrape in to the top 10, but right at the bottom. Many bigger things will hit us
Interesting thought - what are the the biggest stories/events/transformations of the 21st century so far and how would you order them?
I would say: 1: Covid 2: 9/11 and war on terror 3: The rise of online shopping/death of the high street 4: Brexit 5: Financial crisis
4 & 5 might ultimately swap positions.
#3 is probably long term the biggest thing of the last 21 years, but generally gets overlooked.
Pah! Never mind the 21st century, what, in order of impact, are the biggest events/tranformations that affected Britain during the 2nd millennium?
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking:
1. The Norman Conquest (yep, even after nearly a 1000 years) 2. The Industrial Revolution 3. The two World Wars (got to treat them as one) 4. The English Civil War 5. The Reformation
What - no room for the Empire? Printing? the Enlightenment? Who knows?
The 'English Civil War'? I hope you are referring only to the English bits and not using that as a catchall term for the War of the Three Kingdoms/British Civil War - lots of killing to spread around the isles there.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
"Project Fear" lest you forget was an immediate recession and half a million unemployed.
Nobody would have dared use "full employment, job vacancies and pay rises" as Project Fear. Well apart from Stuart Rose, but he was telling the truth not engaging in Fear.
It turned out to be right in almost all respects, except one. I was one of those who expected an immediate hit to business after the referendum, because of the collapse of confidence. That didn't happen (except as regards the exchange rate), and I'm happy to admit I was wrong on that. In retrospect, the long period between the referendum and the end of last year, which is when Brexit actually happened for practical purposes, meant that the effect was much slower that I'd thought it would be.
On the other hand, in many respects it's far, far worse than I was expecting. I never thought relations with our EU ex-friends would get as bad as they now are, or that the government would turn so vehemently anti-business, or that we'd leave such excellent schemes as REACH and CE marking, or not agree an SPS deal with the EU, or that any PM would be so brain-dead as to put a border down the Irish Sea. As a result of those unexpectedly bad decisions, there's a lot more pain to come - much of it hasn't kicked in yet.
I think there was a lot of innocence amongst business. They just assumed, despite all the siren calls for WTO terms etc., that cooler heads would prevail and something, in business terms, similar to EU membership would eventually be carved out. Had they known how things were to transpire, then panic would have ensued as soon as the vote was in.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
"Project Fear" lest you forget was an immediate recession and half a million unemployed.
Nobody would have dared use "full employment, job vacancies and pay rises" as Project Fear. Well apart from Stuart Rose, but he was telling the truth not engaging in Fear.
It turned out to be right in almost all respects, except one. I was one of those who expected an immediate hit to business after the referendum, because of the collapse of confidence. That didn't happen (except as regards the exchange rate), and I'm happy to admit I was wrong on that. In retrospect, the long period between the referendum and the end of last year, which is when Brexit actually happened for practical purposes, meant that the effect was much slower that I'd thought it would be.
On the other hand, in many respects it's far, far worse than I was expecting. I never thought relations with our EU ex-friends would get as bad as they now are, or that the government would turn so vehemently anti-business, or that we'd leave such excellent schemes as REACH and CE marking, or not agree an SPS deal with the EU, or that any PM would be so brain-dead as to put a border down the Irish Sea. As a result of those unexpectedly bad decisions, there's a lot more pain to come - much of it hasn't kicked in yet.
I think there was a lot of innocence amongst business. They just assumed, despite all the siren calls for WTO terms etc., that cooler heads would prevail and something, in business terms, similar to EU membership would be eventually carved out. Had they known how things were to transpire, then panic would have ensued as soon as the vote was in.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
"As they came past us - panting, cajoling, shouting - it was hard to believe what we were seeing.
Here, in broad daylight, were dozens of migrants, manhandling a large inflatable boat down a northern French beach, to get to the seafront in order to cross the Channel.
Forget the normal rules about subterfuge - this was as brazen and overt as you could possibly get. And what's more, eight French police officers were watching from about a hundred metres away, and making no effort to get involved."
Those poor souls, desperate to escape from the eternal misery that is France.
I’m sure we can sympathise with that.
As I've mentioned before, the plight of these refugees shows that this part of France is a Failed State.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
I'll bet you £1,000 that it is.
Interesting bet!
Brexit is bloody big but it’s not monumental. Covid is monumental, so Brexit is already number 2 in the ‘list of significant things to happen to Britain this century’
If Scotland had voted yes that would also have been bigger than Brexit
We’ve got 79 years to go until 2100. If the 21st century is as eventful as the 20th then Brexit will definitely be relegated much further down the list. Let’s hope the 21st century isn’t that ‘interesting’ but the omens so far are that it will be, and might very possibly be much MORE turbulent, from global war with China to proper AI to aliens saying Hi to robots taking over to climate apocalypse to migration wars and on and on
My guess: Brexit will probably scrape in to the top 10, but right at the bottom. Many bigger things will hit us
Interesting thought - what are the the biggest stories/events/transformations of the 21st century so far and how would you order them?
I would say: 1: Covid 2: 9/11 and war on terror 3: The rise of online shopping/death of the high street 4: Brexit 5: Financial crisis
4 & 5 might ultimately swap positions.
#3 is probably long term the biggest thing of the last 21 years, but generally gets overlooked.
Pah! Never mind the 21st century, what, in order of impact, are the biggest events/tranformations that affected Britain during the 2nd millennium?
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking:
1. The Norman Conquest (yep, even after nearly a 1000 years) 2. The Industrial Revolution 3. The two World Wars (got to treat them as one) 4. The English Civil War 5. The Reformation
What - no room for the Empire? Printing? the Enlightenment? Who knows?
I'd put the Empire / colonialisation above the world wars.
The world would be very much different if the British influence was removed from North America, India etc with reverberations back to this country.
"As they came past us - panting, cajoling, shouting - it was hard to believe what we were seeing.
Here, in broad daylight, were dozens of migrants, manhandling a large inflatable boat down a northern French beach, to get to the seafront in order to cross the Channel.
Forget the normal rules about subterfuge - this was as brazen and overt as you could possibly get. And what's more, eight French police officers were watching from about a hundred metres away, and making no effort to get involved."
The weird part is the police's actions doing nothing (which is not surprising), then suddenly seemingly getting dressed up.
At some point, the police officers did move. While standing in the sea, filming the migrant boat and watching men argue about the engine, we noticed that the officers were now standing in a line, about 100 metres away from us.
For some reason, they were now wearing protective riot helmets and some were brandishing shields. Yet they didn't approach the boat, and nobody approached the police
It's not very surprising if you've encountered the local attitudes to immigrants in that part of France.
The hatred is quite intense. They really, really want them gone.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
Remind me what Finlandization means again…? I guess she doesn’t understand the value of freedom
Classic Brexsplaining.
Of course the Finns are too daft to do democracy!
They vie with NZ for the first democratic franchise.
Really? They were part of czarist Russia until 1918.
1917
The media is already in general election mode, the opposition parties are already in general election mode, the countries mood is changing and the Tories - Conservative Party are considering a winter poll, while there is much foot movement for Labour but with the energy price hike and usually older generation tend vote Conservative, but with Boris Johnson it will backfire, the stories alienated all parties and formed a pact with Brexit Party then in 2019, asked the party to stand down and split the vote.
The Tories got away with 86 majority and capitalised on BREXIT three word slogan meme, but in this winter election and the public dissatisfaction, where will they find a majority?
Local elections predicted 40+, September polls shown Boris Johnson would lose his seat Uxbridge & Ruislip plus Dominic Raab's seat and potentially lose 90+ seats accord to data.
Last night's BBC Question Time audience turned against the new Education Secretary,
The polls are not matching up to mood of the nation or the media storm.
The shoe fits on the other foot.
The Army sent to deliver Food, The Army sent to deliver Fuel, The Army driving the Ambulances, etc.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
"Project Fear" lest you forget was an immediate recession and half a million unemployed.
Nobody would have dared use "full employment, job vacancies and pay rises" as Project Fear. Well apart from Stuart Rose, but he was telling the truth not engaging in Fear.
It turned out to be right in almost all respects, except one. I was one of those who expected an immediate hit to business after the referendum, because of the collapse of confidence. That didn't happen (except as regards the exchange rate), and I'm happy to admit I was wrong on that. In retrospect, the long period between the referendum and the end of last year, which is when Brexit actually happened for practical purposes, meant that the effect was much slower that I'd thought it would be.
On the other hand, in many respects it's far, far worse than I was expecting. I never thought relations with our EU ex-friends would get as bad as they now are, or that the government would turn so vehemently anti-business, or that we'd leave such excellent schemes as REACH and CE marking, or not agree an SPS deal with the EU, or that any PM would be so brain-dead as to put a border down the Irish Sea. As a result of those unexpectedly bad decisions, there's a lot more pain to come - much of it hasn't kicked in yet.
And yet, there are signs pointing the opposite way, too. It is disingenuous to pretend Everything is Apocalyptic
‘London banks embark on record hiring spree as City tilts toward post-Brexit --> buff.ly/2Yp2W11’
"As they came past us - panting, cajoling, shouting - it was hard to believe what we were seeing.
Here, in broad daylight, were dozens of migrants, manhandling a large inflatable boat down a northern French beach, to get to the seafront in order to cross the Channel.
Forget the normal rules about subterfuge - this was as brazen and overt as you could possibly get. And what's more, eight French police officers were watching from about a hundred metres away, and making no effort to get involved."
The weird part is the police's actions doing nothing (which is not surprising), then suddenly seemingly getting dressed up.
At some point, the police officers did move. While standing in the sea, filming the migrant boat and watching men argue about the engine, we noticed that the officers were now standing in a line, about 100 metres away from us.
For some reason, they were now wearing protective riot helmets and some were brandishing shields. Yet they didn't approach the boat, and nobody approached the police
It's not very surprising if you've encountered the local attitudes to immigrants in that part of France.
The hatred is quite intense. They really, really want them gone.
I'm not surprised at all the French police don't do anything, it hardly seems in their interest or that of French politicians, it's the performative posing I didn;t get.
"As they came past us - panting, cajoling, shouting - it was hard to believe what we were seeing.
Here, in broad daylight, were dozens of migrants, manhandling a large inflatable boat down a northern French beach, to get to the seafront in order to cross the Channel.
Forget the normal rules about subterfuge - this was as brazen and overt as you could possibly get. And what's more, eight French police officers were watching from about a hundred metres away, and making no effort to get involved."
The weird part is the police's actions doing nothing (which is not surprising), then suddenly seemingly getting dressed up.
At some point, the police officers did move. While standing in the sea, filming the migrant boat and watching men argue about the engine, we noticed that the officers were now standing in a line, about 100 metres away from us.
For some reason, they were now wearing protective riot helmets and some were brandishing shields. Yet they didn't approach the boat, and nobody approached the police
It's not very surprising if you've encountered the local attitudes to immigrants in that part of France.
The hatred is quite intense. They really, really want them gone.
I'm not surprised at all the French police don't do anything, it hardly seems in their interest or that of French politicians, it's the performative posing I didn;t get.
Which part of "Don't you dare come back on our fucking beach, you barstewards, because we have a beating waiting for you" didn't you understand from the description of the performance?
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
I would be astonished if come the end of the 21st century, assuming there is still a human race, that Brexit would be in the top 10 of significant things to happen to the UK. If we can't cope with leaving an overgrown trade organisation we are doomed because far bigger problems await us.
I'll bet you £1,000 that it is.
Interesting bet!
Brexit is bloody big but it’s not monumental. Covid is monumental, so Brexit is already number 2 in the ‘list of significant things to happen to Britain this century’
If Scotland had voted yes that would also have been bigger than Brexit
We’ve got 79 years to go until 2100. If the 21st century is as eventful as the 20th then Brexit will definitely be relegated much further down the list. Let’s hope the 21st century isn’t that ‘interesting’ but the omens so far are that it will be, and might very possibly be much MORE turbulent, from global war with China to proper AI to aliens saying Hi to robots taking over to climate apocalypse to migration wars and on and on
My guess: Brexit will probably scrape in to the top 10, but right at the bottom. Many bigger things will hit us
Interesting thought - what are the the biggest stories/events/transformations of the 21st century so far and how would you order them?
I would say: 1: Covid 2: 9/11 and war on terror 3: The rise of online shopping/death of the high street 4: Brexit 5: Financial crisis
4 & 5 might ultimately swap positions.
#3 is probably long term the biggest thing of the last 21 years, but generally gets overlooked.
Pah! Never mind the 21st century, what, in order of impact, are the biggest events/tranformations that affected Britain during the 2nd millennium?
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking:
1. The Norman Conquest (yep, even after nearly a 1000 years) 2. The Industrial Revolution 3. The two World Wars (got to treat them as one) 4. The English Civil War 5. The Reformation
What - no room for the Empire? Printing? the Enlightenment? Who knows?
The 'English Civil War'? I hope you are referring only to the English bits and not using that as a catchall term for the War of the Three Kingdoms/British Civil War - lots of killing to spread around the isles there.
Relatively far more than in England IIRC.
But what did the Scottish and Irish slaughters achieve which is comparable to the overthrow and legal execution of a country's king ?
That was a fundamental shift not mere historical noise.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
I didn't know Leicestershire was still in the middle ages.
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
Yes, but the key thing is that University offers the opportunity (not certainty) of more interesting work, and work with prospect of advancement. I don't blame people for looking for it.
So you think you need to go to university to get 'interesting work' and 'prospects of advancement' ?
I'll assume there's no casual snobbery but have you considered what might apply for yourself might not apply for some other people ?
Now I don't criticize anyone for looking into university but what I don't like is that the £10k debt per year is something which will not go away and that's a big risk any teenager is accepting when their experience of the wider world is limited.
If going to university turns out to be the wrong decision they still have the debt and years have been used (with lost earning potential) on something which might be of no use.
If getting a job turns out to be the wrong decision then they've still had experience in the workplace, earned some money and perhaps learned that a certain career is not for them but with no debt and still have the opportunity to go to university a year or two afterwards.
No, not snobbery.
I am just accepting that youngsters have agency and are able to make their own decisions about what they want to do with the opportunities that come their way.
Decision making improves with knowledge and experience.
And many decisions made can turn out to be mistakes.
The LibDems supporting an increase in tuition fees for example.
I only hope that there aren't too many teenagers who have made a fuck-up decision of that magnitude in their career choice this year.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
That fine nobleman, late of this manor, SeanT, did warn us of the impending pains of Brexit, in his baby article in the Spectator
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
It's progress of a sort. At least the ludicrous outright denial that there were going to be any downsides at all is melting away, into a grudging admittance that Brexit is a disaster, albeit it is claimed a temporary disaster, for sectors such as haulage, agriculture, and especially fishing. It now turns out that that was part of the plan all along, just a part that they omitted to tell us (and especially the haulage industry, farmers and fishermen) about, and indeed which they sneered at as 'Project Fear'.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
"Project Fear" lest you forget was an immediate recession and half a million unemployed.
Nobody would have dared use "full employment, job vacancies and pay rises" as Project Fear. Well apart from Stuart Rose, but he was telling the truth not engaging in Fear.
It turned out to be right in almost all respects, except one. I was one of those who expected an immediate hit to business after the referendum, because of the collapse of confidence. That didn't happen (except as regards the exchange rate), and I'm happy to admit I was wrong on that. In retrospect, the long period between the referendum and the end of last year, which is when Brexit actually happened for practical purposes, meant that the effect was much slower that I'd thought it would be.
On the other hand, in many respects it's far, far worse than I was expecting. I never thought relations with our EU ex-friends would get as bad as they now are, or that the government would turn so vehemently anti-business, or that we'd leave such excellent schemes as REACH and CE marking, or not agree an SPS deal with the EU, or that any PM would be so brain-dead as to put a border down the Irish Sea. As a result of those unexpectedly bad decisions, there's a lot more pain to come - much of it hasn't kicked in yet.
And yet in an act of blatant spite/stupidity, the EU put a hard border down the island of Ireland.....
Two words that demonstrate what a bunch of c**** you would have still ruling us: Covid vaccines.
Comments
IMHO what has happened, partly through FOM, partly through over educating some quite dim people, is the creation of some millions of non-jobs, many of which should in a sane world vanish, being replaced by sensible ones, like designing and making machinery for picking strawberries and blackcurrants.
David Graeber is the man for this. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
While the sensible individual needs to pick their way through the minefield ignoring all the time wasters.
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
I was in a bookshop the other day and, staring at the shelves, found myself longing for a Ctrl F function.
But of course he may be right. In which case you think a period of labour shortages would begin to eliminate such jobs, as well as causing supply-line issues, empty-shelves and accelerating inflation.
Maybe this is all part of Johnson's master plan... but somehow I think it just one huge f*ck-up.
Even if that wasn't a lump of labour fallacy, that's like the late, great @SeanT coming on here and saying he has a crisis of too many hot, nubile, young women throwing themselves at him.
Oh and did you miss my comment earlier. Was your Embolden yesterday a clue as to how you can manage to be on here all the time?
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
1) A fixed maximum wage of 4d a day in Summer, 5d in Winter.
2) Anyone without a job gets branded with V for Vagabond on the face.
I'll assume there's no casual snobbery but have you considered what might apply for yourself might not apply for some other people ?
Now I don't criticize anyone for looking into university but what I don't like is that the £10k debt per year is something which will not go away and that's a big risk any teenager is accepting when their experience of the wider world is limited.
If going to university turns out to be the wrong decision they still have the debt and years have been used (with lost earning potential) on something which might be of no use.
If getting a job turns out to be the wrong decision then they've still had experience in the workplace, earned some money and perhaps learned that a certain career is not for them but with no debt and still have the opportunity to go to university a year or two afterwards.
I for one believe @Philip_Thompson is a real person!
Won't hold my breath though. It will be prettified or used for shooting or some such.
He goes super early to give himself another guaranteed two years. Johnson has already indicated he plans to ride the gravy train after a couple of years into his next victory, so 2026 would fit perfectly. That of course is not the reason for going early. The reason for going early is to avoid a future loss should the economy continue to look grim all the way to 2024.
They always looked down on the eurosceptics as thick racist cranks. Recall Cameron’s lofty dismissal of UKIP. Recall the many times we were told ‘the EU is not an issue, polls show it’. So they ignored the dangers as trivial. All the while eurosceptic opinion crept into the mainstream, undermining the foundations of consent in our polity like a rot in the basement.
Indeed this snobbery probably helped push Leave over the referendum finishing line. Remain could easily have won if they’d been just a touch less arrogant, wanky, condescending and complacent
Everyone else is pretty similar I guess, its pretty much the same names on here each day.
As for Embolden, that name worked for the pun so it was a lucky shout that's all - glad it 'broke the timeline' and won you some money though. But I have been gambling more recently and getting a decent income from it lately, trying to be careful but have found a system that is working for me very nicely indeed. I won't write it in public though, its not politics-related, so PM if interested.
Good night all.
This energy crisis and supply crisis is worldwide and yes, UK has labour shortages now we do not use cheap EU labour depressing UK wages.
Expect to see labour crossover very soon but it does not alter the fundamentals unless labour wants to turn the taps on again of cheap foreign labour
A bit f****** late for me as the sun begins to shine on those unicorn roamed uplands on the eve of my eightieth birthday.
I am just accepting that youngsters have agency and are able to make their own decisions about what they want to do with the opportunities that come their way.
And apols to @Philip_Thompson for implying anyone thought he was a bot!
It really isn't about a purely financial cost/benefit analysis.
Brexit is bloody big but it’s not monumental. Covid is monumental, so Brexit is already number 2 in the ‘list of significant things to happen to Britain this century’
If Scotland had voted yes that would also have been bigger than Brexit
We’ve got 79 years to go until 2100. If the 21st century is as eventful as the 20th then Brexit will definitely be relegated much further down the list. Let’s hope the 21st century isn’t that ‘interesting’ but the omens so far are that it will be, and might very possibly be much MORE turbulent, from global war with China to proper AI to aliens saying Hi to robots taking over to climate apocalypse to migration wars and on and on
My guess: Brexit will probably scrape in to the top 10, but right at the bottom. Many bigger things will hit us
I was a Remainer until 2016, though I thought that the EU was flawed I felt like the pros outweighed the cons. But then people here posted some interesting pros, the cons kept mounting up so eventually I switched sides and backed Leave but always expected there to be disruption. Either way though I could always see arguments on both sides, it wasn't all or nothing.
So when people now post about disruption then my attitude is "well what else did you expect?" Of course there's going to be some disruption. Not having any is like wanting flowers to grow but for there to never be any rain.
Still, prodigal son and all that.
I and many others like a quiet life. Sorry if that isn't economically productive.
I would say:
1: Covid
2: 9/11 and war on terror
3: The rise of online shopping/death of the high street
4: Brexit
5: Financial crisis
4 & 5 might ultimately swap positions.
#3 is probably long term the biggest thing of the last 21 years, but generally gets overlooked.
On another note, saw this in another place....
The wind blew thinly on the ridge of the bank
Where the river once flowed strong and wide.
Time flows ever onward while the rivertop sank
And in the wind the walls slowly dried.
And the eventual silence lay like the tomb
Of pharaohs yet to be born
And the Cambrian bloom died in the dry planet's womb
With none left behind there to mourn.
'Till a rover did spy in the red dusty sky
The remains of the beauty that bled
And the story it told of a river that flowed
Made me sad to think it was dead
‘Thirdly, there will be blood. Brexit is going to be painful, like childbirth. It just is. The Leave quacks who promised a brisk and blissful delivery don’t have enough diamorphine to dull the nerves. We might need epidurals from the Treasury. We will swear a lot, and not care. It might be rather embarrassing but again, we probably won’t care, because we’ll be concentrating on the pain. Other countries will look at us and think 'I’m never going through that'. Immediately after Brexit, we will likely appear reduced, saggy, wrinkled.’
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-brexit-is-just-like-having-a-baby
Disraeli - blocking the above.
Palmerston - forts (I do like them).
Pitt - winning the wars.
Walpole - being Prime Prime Minister.
After all, those with no serious work to do have much more time for the office politics of self preservation.
Nobody would have dared use "full employment, job vacancies and pay rises" as Project Fear. Well apart from Stuart Rose, but he was telling the truth not engaging in Fear.
https://news.sky.com/story/migrant-crisis-sky-news-witnesses-chaotic-boat-launches-near-calais-12429092
"As they came past us - panting, cajoling, shouting - it was hard to believe what we were seeing.
Here, in broad daylight, were dozens of migrants, manhandling a large inflatable boat down a northern French beach, to get to the seafront in order to cross the Channel.
Forget the normal rules about subterfuge - this was as brazen and overt as you could possibly get. And what's more, eight French police officers were watching from about a hundred metres away, and making no effort to get involved."
And many decisions made can turn out to be mistakes.
The LibDems supporting an increase in tuition fees for example.
I only hope that there aren't too many teenagers who have made a fuck-up decision of that magnitude in their career choice this year.
Computers existed and were common in the home before access to the Internet became widely available, but the world we live in now is very different from the world of the 70s or 80s. Your phone in your pocket is a much more personal and powerful computer than what we used to call personal computers. The Internet and ubiquity of smartphones is a much bigger change than Brexit.
On the other hand, in many respects it's far, far worse than I was expecting. I never thought relations with our EU ex-friends would get as bad as they now are, or that the government would turn so vehemently anti-business, or that we'd leave such excellent schemes as REACH and CE marking, or not agree an SPS deal with the EU, or that any PM would be so brain-dead as to put a border down the Irish Sea. As a result of those unexpectedly bad decisions, there's a lot more pain to come - much of it hasn't kicked in yet.
I'd almost forgotten.
At some point, the police officers did move. While standing in the sea, filming the migrant boat and watching men argue about the engine, we noticed that the officers were now standing in a line, about 100 metres away from us.
For some reason, they were now wearing protective riot helmets and some were brandishing shields. Yet they didn't approach the boat, and nobody approached the police
2016 we decided we wanted to have the baby.
2017 we started trying, but found it difficult to conceive at first.
2017-19 was spent arguing about whether we should still go ahead with having a child or not, should we give up on the whole concept, go natural, use IVF. Drugs or a hard home birth? Nobody could agree and it led to many fights.
January 2020 (Brexit day) finally got pregnant! But now comes a "transition" period of pregnancy before the child is born.
New Year's Eve the transition ends and the child finally comes screaming into the world.
Brexit will never be "complete" in the way you're trying to mean it.
Unless they can drive an HGV.....
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking:
1. The Norman Conquest (yep, even after nearly a 1000 years)
2. The Industrial Revolution
3. The two World Wars (got to treat them as one)
4. The English Civil War
5. The Reformation
What - no room for the Empire? Printing? the Enlightenment? Who knows?
No wonder he only had the strength for 4 years at the top.
No doubt @Philip_Thompson will see this as a victory for British consumers as we have free access to European goods, while Europeans are deprived of our goods, therefore advantage to British consumers.
Smartphones absolutely should have made the list though too. Utterly ubiquitous now and meaning people are always-online wherever they are anywhere on the planet now.
A pretty hefty list for just 2 decades, possibly matching the first decades of the 20th century, which was horrifically busy. It also shows that, ultimately, Brexit will be seen as relatively minor. It won’t make the global top 10, and might not even make the UK top ten
Similarly with tariffs. I'd be happy to unilaterally abolish all tariffs even if other parties don't.
When do we invade and steal their oil?
The world would be very much different if the British influence was removed from North America, India etc with reverberations back to this country.
The hatred is quite intense. They really, really want them gone.
The Tories got away with 86 majority and capitalised on BREXIT three word slogan meme, but in this winter election and the public dissatisfaction, where will they find a majority?
Local elections predicted 40+, September polls shown Boris Johnson would lose his seat Uxbridge & Ruislip plus Dominic Raab's seat and potentially lose 90+ seats accord to data.
Last night's BBC Question Time audience turned against the new Education Secretary,
The polls are not matching up to mood of the nation or the media storm.
The shoe fits on the other foot.
The Army sent to deliver Food, The Army sent to deliver Fuel, The Army driving the Ambulances,
etc.
‘London banks embark on record hiring spree as City tilts toward post-Brexit --> buff.ly/2Yp2W11’
https://twitter.com/cityam/status/1446486175582199835?s=21
But what did the Scottish and Irish slaughters achieve which is comparable to the overthrow and legal execution of a country's king ?
That was a fundamental shift not mere historical noise.
Two words that demonstrate what a bunch of c**** you would have still ruling us: Covid vaccines.